Along with generations of music lovers, my heart sank when I heard that Merle Haggard had died this week on his 79th birthday at Shade Tree Manor, his rambling, tile-roofed hacienda overlooking 700 acres of oak-studded pasture land just outside of the Sacramento Valley town of Redding.

I’d interviewed him on the phone just last April, before his concert at Marin Center, and

Merle Haggard, who turned 78 earlier this month, has aged and mellowed since he expressed the anger and frustration of many working people when he wrote ‘Okie from Muskogee.’ (Photo by Myriam Santos)

I’m especially grateful now that he’s gone that I did. As we all know, Haggard became famous in 1969 for “Okie from Muskogee,” his proletarian put-down of protesters and pot smokers. A 1990 New Yorker profile had only one word in its headline, “Ornery,” adding to his irascible outlaw image. But the opposite turned out to be true when I spoke to him. As I wrote in my column then, he was the most cordial, congenial and candid interview I’d done in a long while.

At one point, he was talking about a new album and a song he’d written for it, “Karma’s Coming,” that’s critical of the government’s hurtful immigration policies. Then he told me a story that takes on an even greater resonance now, during this era of intolerance and incivility by Donald Trump and his angry, white supporters.

Merle said he’d driven into his friendly neighborhood gas station one day, the same one he’d been going to for 20 years. And when the owner didn’t come out to wash his windshield, a courtesy he’d always extended to his faithful customers, he went inside to ask what was up. The new owner, a Middle Eastern man in a turban, was behind the counter. When Merle asked him if he was going to honor his longtime customers and wash their windows the way the former owner had, he looked out at Merle’s car and then back at Merle and snapped, ”What’s wrong with your hands?”

Merle told him he didn’t appreciate that kind of rudeness, saying, “You’re gonna run off your old customers. And you’re messing up my country.” Those words had barely escaped from his lips when the new owner replied testily, “It’s not your country.”

Merle’s reaction to that surprised me. Rather than bringing out the fightin’ side of him, an older, wiser, more tolerant side emerged.

“I suddenly realized he was right,” he told me. “It’s really not my country. It should be everybody’s. According to the creeds we’ve written, everyone in the world has the right to come here. But we don’t give people much slack, and we’re gonna suffer from some of the great mistakes we’ve made. Karma’s coming.”

Is anyone else as disgusted as I am by DirecTV’s ‘Don’t Be Like This Me’ campaign, the ones featuring NFL quarterbacks Tony Romo, Andrew Luck, the Manning brothers and the newly added wide receiver Randy Moss?

Elton John performs at the Lands End Stage during day 3 of the 2015 Outside Lands Music And Arts Festival at Golden Gate Park on August 9, 2015 in San Francisco, California. (sfoutsidelands.com photo by FilmMagic)

Dying to know which headliner at Outside Lands last weekend got the most Twitter buzz? Me neither. But it turns out to be semi-fascinating nonetheless. And how often do I get to have an always exciting pie chart with my blog?

We can thank Datameer, a San Francisco-based analytics company, for going to the trouble of counting the number of Tweets for the three main Outside Lands acts — the Black Keys, Mumford and Sons and Elton John — both before and during the gargantuan Golden Gate Park rock fest.

The Black Keys had the most action in the days leading up to the festival, according to Datameer, while Mumford and Sons and Sir Elton were practically Tweet-less. But Mumford started to get traction the day before the opening and the Black Keys began trending the next day. But Sir John, resplendent in an electric blue tuxedo with “Fantastic” bedazzled across the back, went on stage on the final day and set Twitter on fire like a candle in the wind. The Rocket Man (blue on the chart) shot skyward statistically, roaring past Mumford (yellow) and the Keys (orange) like Bennie and the Jets, generating 36.4 percent of all the Tweets compared to 33.7 percent for Mumford and 29.9 percent for the Black Keys. It just does to show that old guys may start slow, but they almost always finish fast.

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Did anyone really think the Fare Thee Well shows were the last time we’d see the surviving members of the Grateful Dead playing together? The way it looks now, those five 50th anniversary concerts, two in Santa Clara and three … Continue reading →

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Douglas Soesbe, the writer of “Boulevard,” Robin Williams’ last movie, thanked me in an email for my story in Thursday’s IJ about reviewers and audiences wondering if Williams, who took his own life in his Tiburon home last August, was expressing his own mental anguish in the part of Nolan Mack, the sad, depressed character he plays on screen. Continue reading →

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Photographer-filmmaker Chris Felver has added to the musical ambience of downtown Mill Valley with a rotating exhibit of black and white photographs from his new book, “American Jukebox,” at Vasco restaurant, on the corner at 106 Throckmorton. The first theme — “Texas Cosmic Cowboys,” including portraits of Willie Nelson, Billie Joe Shaver, Robert Earl Keen, Emmylou Harris and others Lone Star troubadours from the 240 photos in Chris’s handsome coffee table book, published by Indiana University Press. Continue reading →

Gordon Hensley, a GOP communications consultant, president of Washington, D.C.-based Strategic Media and longtime Deadhead, has always been fascinated by the diversity of Grateful Dead fans. As the four surviving members of the iconic Marin-based band celebrated their 50th anniversary with three Fare Thee Well shows over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago, Hensley sent me the results of a bipartisan national poll he commissioned on the Dead’s popularity among Democrats and Republicans. Some of its findings, I have to say, blew my mind.

I gave a talk about Marin rock history at the Mill Valley Library recently, screening photos from the IJ archives to illustrate it. The presentation was so well received and well attended that I’ve expanded it into a multi-media celebration of Marin County rock at 8 p.m. Friday, May 22, at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley.

I’ll be screening more of our archival photos and telling stories about such Marin icons as the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jesse Colin Young and Bonnie Raitt, to name a few. My band, the Liberators — guitarist Jimmy Dillon, keyboardist Austin deLone, drummer Kevin Hayes and bassist Eric McCann — will be playing some of the songs that have given Marin one of the richest legacies in rock.

We’ll be joined by some extraordinary guests, including West Marin’s Tim Weed, one of the world’s great banjo players; the young Marin duo Faust & Fox and former Talking Head Jerry Harrison and his daughter, Aishlin.

This is an ambitious endeavor that can only succeed with your support. If you’ve been reading my columns over the years and would like to say hello in person and be part of what I hope will be a special evening, it will be wonderful to see you at Sweetwater on the 22nd for a night of music and memories for grown-ups who haven’t forgotten how to rock ‘n’ roll. Tickets are $15 at sweetwatermusichall.com.

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Red Rocker Sammy Hagar called the other day excited about the new happy hour he’s kicked off on the outdoor patio of at his El Paseo restaurant in Mill Valley during the warm evenings of spring and summer.

“I was threatening to take my acoustic guitar down there and actually play,” Sammy said. “But I can’t afford me. I’m too expensive.”

Believing that fine dining doesn’t have to be formal, super casual Sammy has ditched the starched white tablecloths that have been part of the El Paseo experience since Sammy and celebrity chef Tyler Florence took over the charming, nearly 80-year-old eatery in 2011.

“I threw them out,” he said. ” I don’t want people to think we’re stuffy. We’re learning as we go. But I’m happy with this place. I love it, love it, love it.”

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Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter gave a rare interview to Rolling Stone recently in celebration of the Dead’s 50th anniversary and the “core four’s” three “Fare Thee Well” concerts in Chicago this summer.

The 73-year-old San Rafael resident met Jerry Garcia at a local production of “Damn Yankees” in Palo Alto when they were still teenagers. As we all know, they would go on to form one of the greatest teams in rock songwriting history. For their collaborations on such Dead classics as “Ripple,” “Truckin’,” “Touch of Grey,” “Dark Star,” “Uncle John’s Band” and all those many others, he and Jerry will be inducted into the songwriters Hall of Fame in June.

Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia (Credit: Jay Blakesberg)

According to Hunter, Garcia hated having to sit down and write songs. “He said, ‘I would rather toss cards in a hat than write songs,’ and that was very true,” Hunter told Rolling Stone’s David Browne. Early on, just hanging out, they would watch Porter Wagoner’s country music show on TV before turning on “Sesame Street.” “It was mind-boggling,” Hunter said. “There was nothing ever like that on television before.”

His favorite line of all the great ones he wrote? ”Let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men,” from Ripple. ” His favorite Dead era? “I think the most fun was down in L.A. doing ‘Anthem of the Sun,’ which was way back in the beginning for me, just hanging around being great friends and all that kind of stuff.” He quotes Bob Weir’s memorable line to the producer they were working with. “We’re looking for the sound of thick air.”

There should be plenty of that when Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart play those three epic shows at Soldier Field in the humidity of the Midwest in July.

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